Difficult People: A Gateway to Enlightenment

BY Lisette Larkins

For most of us, difficult people are the bane of our existence. They annoy us, they throw us off balance, they test our patience, and—to one degree or another—they provoke reactions that are decidedly unhealthy. But it is also true that difficult people (DPs) mirror our own dysfunctional mental states and provide us with wonderful opportunities to understand ourselves, heal ourselves, and learn to live in the moment.

Lisette Larkins realized the positive aspect of dealing with difficult people when she was providing care for a late-stage Alzheimer’s patient. Through daily interactions with a DP, Larkins began a personal journey of exploration that ultimately led to spiritual awakening. In Difficult People: A Gateway to Enlightenment, Larkins shares her journey and guides readers in reaching a “chronic state of well-being.”

Lisette Larkins has worked as a sales director in publishing and a spiritual guide. In 2007, she took a job as the caregiver of a late-stage Alzheimer’s patient, an experience that pushed her into a permanent state of “presence” and revealed the possibility of living in a “chronic state of well-being.” Larkins, who has had extraordinary paranormal experiences since childhood, is the author of three books.

Excerpt:

The New Ashram and Guru: Everyday Problems and the Difficult Person

Like many spiritual seekers, I yearned to know the truth about myself as an immortal being; to experience what it was like to have the mind’s compulsive thinking actually stop. Only an enlightened person could experience such chronic bliss, blessed with a predictably graceful ability to embrace whatever showed up as the present moment. Such masters resist nothing. They are gentle, peaceful beings.

To know ultimate freedom from reacting emotionally to the ups and downs of life with its inherent periodic mental suffering, to attain self-realization in the same way that other spiritual masters have, is the ultimate attainment for any serious seeker of spiritual truth. Such an experience of self-realization occurs as a gradual process or in a burst of awakening for the student who is ripe, spiritually speaking. Attainment of self-realization is the prize to which every spiritual sage has aspired since the beginning of time.

Like many seekers, I assumed that realizing this permanent state of well-being, in which stillness of mind prevails, was an achievement possible somewhere in a distant future. Meanwhile, like every other person I knew, my noisy mind rattled compulsively. There were many moments of peace daily, but such inner peace was not unshakeable.

Then, in 2005, an inner prompting urged me to leave my position in Virginia as sales director for Hampton Roads Publishing Company; to leave a long-term romantic relationship; to leave behind my identity as an author of three books about the deeply spiritual nature of extraterrestrial contact phenomena, which included a role as speaker and radio guest.

Moving from the East coast, back to the home of my childhood in Southern California, I had no idea why an inner force was calling me or what my next step would be.

Returning to Malibu, I lived with my divorced mother. My father soon joined us, in need of care for his terminal cancer. My grown siblings were there too, one who recently had had a baby. Nephews and nieces came to stay or visited often. As a woman in her late forties, I found this curious indeed: to find myself again living with my family of origin. At one point my grown son even moved to the Malibu property.

With ages ranging from ninety-one to newborn, the environment was ripe for spiritual practice because there were so many differing cherished viewpoints floating about. Any individual who was able to peacefully coexist within such a loaded and diverse environment and remain unshakably and demonstrably accepting and content would be remarkable.

It was not that there were lots of arguments, but rather, as a long-term student of the practice of stilling the noisy mind, I noticed that mine still had lots of secret thoughts of judgment or correction. Although I was aware that this was the normal state of most everyone’s mind-chronic comparing, contrasting, and judgment and its attendant self-righteous feeling of being offended—I wanted a more heightened spiritual perspective for myself…